Book Image

Mastering Bash

By : Giorgio Zarrelli
Book Image

Mastering Bash

By: Giorgio Zarrelli

Overview of this book

System administration is an everyday effort that involves a lot of tedious tasks, and devious pits. Knowing your environment is the key to unleashing the most powerful solution that will make your life easy as an administrator, and show you the path to new heights. Bash is your Swiss army knife to set up your working or home environment as you want, when you want. This book will enable you to customize your system step by step, making your own real, virtual, home out of it. The journey will take you swiftly through the basis of the shell programming in Bash to more interesting and challenging tasks. You will be introduced to one of the most famous open source monitoring systems—Nagios, and write complex programs with it in any languages. You’ll see how to perform checks on your sites and applications. Moving on, you’ll discover how to write your own daemons so you can create your services and take advantage of inter-process communication to let your scripts talk to each other. So, despite these being everyday tasks, you’ll have a lot of fun on the way. By the end of the book, you will have gained advanced knowledge of Bash that will help you automate routine tasks and manage your systems.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Passwordless connections

One of the most useful features in the everyday life of a Linux user is the ability to connect to remote servers without the burden of remembering all the addresses, ports, users, and passwords. Well, if one resorts to using some kind of client such as Putty, it can store all these details in a connection snippet. We can recall when we need to log in to a remote host, but Linux offers a more native and practical way to reach this goal. We are talking about passwordless connections, which means we just ssh to a host alias and we are in, no questions asked, and nothing other than an alias to remember.

What do we need to set up such a nice connection method? We have a few actors in place: we have to check the server setup, generate some keys, and configure the client.

...